1911

216

To: KARL KAUTSKY

Published:
First published in part December 31, 1928, in the newspaper Der Abend.
Published in full in 1964 in German in the journal International Review of Social History, Vol. IX, Part 2.
First published in Russian in 1965 in Collected Works, Fifth (Russian) Ed., Vol. 54.
Sent to Berlin.
Printed from the original.
Translated from the German.
Source:Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[1977],
Moscow,
Volume 43,
pages 263-265.
Translated: Martin Parker and Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
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• README

You have probably not forgotten that you promised an article for our
journal Mysl. The first issue of Mysl has already come
out (in Moscow) and it has not been confiscated. It contains, among other
things, articles by Plekhanov on Tolstoy and on Italian opportunism
(compared with our liquidators), my article on statistics on strikes during
the Russian
revolution,[1]
Rozhkov’s article on the new agrarian policy of the Russian
counter-revolutionaries, etc. Issue No. 2 will be out shortly. We would be
extremely grateful to you if you could write something for us—about
neutrality, for instance, and against trade union neutrality. This question
has again been coming up for discussion here now and perhaps you will like
to dwell in somewhat greater detail on what you wrote about Legien in
Neue Zeit. Needless to say, we shall be happy to receive any
article from you on any
subject.[4]

I am sending you by book-post my article against Martov and Trotsky,
not for publication, but to ask your advice. Karski has already replied to
Martov You wanted to leave it to me to write the article against
Trotsky. But you will see from my article that it is very difficult for me
to criticise Trotsky without touching Martov. Perhaps you could advise me
how to make the article suitable for Neue
Zeit.[2]

I should like to offer the editors of Neue Zeit two more
articles: I) on Russian strike statistics for 1905–07. This is probably
the first time we have statistics on mass strikes (economic and political
separately) for the entire period of the revolution. The opportunists
(=Menshevik liquidators) are constantly accusing us Russian Bolsheviks of
“romanticism” and “Blanquism”. The best answer to this perhaps is dry
statistics which might be not without interest for the German comrades as
well. If you agree in principle, I shall send you either a detailed excerpt
from my article or else the complete translation. I am only afraid that my
article will be too long for Neue Zeit.

2) I have prepared for a Russian journal a summary of German
agricultural production statistics for 1907 (the three volumes already
out).[3]
I don’t know yet whether it will be printed in Russia or not. As can be
seen from the German Social-Democratic press, this subject has already been
discussed, but regrettably (for instance in Vorwärts) solely on
the basis of a bourgeois treatment of the material. I have come to the
conclusion that the 1907 census bears out the Marxist theory and refutes
the bourgeois (including David’s theory). The data on female and child
labour (employed more by peasants owning 5–10 hectares of land
than by the capitalists or by proletarian farms), for instance, seem
particularly interesting to me. Here the number of working members of the
family and of hired workers is given for the first time. It turns out that
in the group of owners with 10–20 hectares of land the number of hired
workers amounts on the average to 1.7 per farm, and the number of working
members of the family, to 3.4. These are already big peasants who cannot do
without wage labour.

Extremely instructive, too, is the classification of farms according to
total number of workers (I break them up
into three main groups: 1–3, 4–5, 6 and more workers, including hired
labour).

Do you think such a treatment would be of interest to German readers?
If so, I would gladly write on this subject for Neue Zeit—only
the work I have prepared is far too voluminous!

If the “peasant farms” (5–10, 10–20 hectares) specially prospered
in the period 1895–1907, this, in my opinion, is no evidence of the
success of “small-scale production”. It merely testifies to the success
of intensive capitalist farming and livestock raising in
particular. The reduction in the area of the farms signifies expansion of
capitalist and big-peasant livestock farming.

I trust that you are now quite well and that you will answer Quessel
and Maslov yourself.

P.S. I am very grateful to your wife for writing to me during your
illness. I wanted to write her myself but thought that instead of giving my
opinion about Trotsky’s article in a letter, it would be better to send my
article. I am sending it not only for you, but also for your wife, as an
answer to her letter.

Notes

[3]See the article “The Capitalist System of Modern Agriculture” and
preparatory notes for it, “German Agrarian Statistics (1907)” and “Plan
for Processing the Data of the German Agricultural Census of June 12,
1907” (present edition, Vol. 16, pp. 423–46, and Vol. 40, pp. 297–371,
372–75).—Ed.

[4]The beginning of Kautsky’s “Tactical Trends Among German
Social-Democrats” was published in the journal Mysl No. 5, April
1911.